Accessibility in Inspera Assessment

Digital accessibility is the process of making digital products (websites, mobile apps and other digital tools and technologies) accessible to everyone. It is about providing all users access to the same information and functionality, regardless of the impairments they may have, preventing discriminating against certain individuals.

Inspera is committed to not discriminating and taking part in the social responsibility of making the web accessible for everyone. We will do what we can to ensure that our solutions and services can be used by anyone with disabilities.

Inspera will help customers be compliant when they use Inspera Assessment. It might be that Inspera is not directly obligated to comply with accessibility legislation, but we have customers in the public sector and other industries where accessibility is a regulatory requirement throughout the supply chain. This makes accessibility a compliance requirement for Inspera as well.

We offer built-in support options for test takers with learning support needs. Through the test taker's settings panel, exam content (including font) in Inspera can be magnified, both by using predefined enlargement sizes, regular, large and extra large, but also by using zoom functions on the web browser, keyboard/mouse shortcuts or accessibility tools. Test takers can also invert the colour scheme for better contrast.

We support screen readers and also have a built-in text-to-speech tool (TTS). TTS is available in open and lock down versions of tests. To operate, test takers simply highlight text and then press play to hear it read out by their speakers or headphones. If our most secure lock-down browser, Inspera Exam Portal, is used, screen readers will not work during the login process, however it will work during the exam sitting if accessibility options are enabled on the test. Using the less secure Safe Exam Browser or a generic web browser, screen readers will work and we are working on supporting screen readers in the login process of Inspera Exam Portal as well.

You can control the length of an assessment for individual test-takers. Time adjustments can be added either as planned extra time for test takers with learning support needs and/or during the assessment, e.g. extra time can be granted due to an incident. Candidates can also be allocated individual start times.

Generation of a PDF to support pen and paper delivery is supported via Inspera Print Manager. The printable version includes all the questions, images and text fields but will obviously not include any audio or video stimulus. Correct answers can also be removed from the print version.

WCAG Compliance Status

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the most broadly recognised industry standard for accessibility on the web and in mobile apps, and the standard Inspera has chosen to match our accessibility against. We acknowledge that there are other standards and legal requirements that can differ slightly, but we believe that the majority of accessibility issues are covered if we comply with the WCAG standards.

The test taker user journey is one of the two major use cases for Inspera Assessment, and cover all functionality used by a student to complete an exam from end to end. As this will affect all end-users of our eAssessment solution, it is imperative that this user journey is fully compliant with all accessibility standards. Currently, Inspera Assessment is compliant with WCAG 2.1 Level AA on all areas except for:

• We support 200% zoom without horizontal scroll and not the 400% requirement.
• Some drop-down list content does not respond correctly to text spacing changes.

Advanced users including content managers, invigilators, markers and test administrators, are users normally hired by the education institution using Inspera Assessment for digital exams. It is for these users we currently have the most issues related to accessibility. A third party WCAG 2.1 level AA compliance assessment completed in June 2021 shows one or more accessibility issues within these areas:

• Not all features are not accessible by only using a keyboard.
• When using custom colour schemes and images, the contrast might be insufficient.
• Markups such as alternative text for binary objects and form field labels are missing in some places, reducing the effectiveness of using aids such as text-to-speech tools.

We are working on being fully compliant with WCAG 2.1 level AA for all modules and user journeys. We acknowledge that this is important for many of our customers and will present updates and plans for resolving specific issues through the roadmap.

Some things will take time and need additional technical improvements. Content elements such as math expressions and illustrations embedded into images require more artificial intelligence functionality than what is currently available and will take time before it can be supported with full accessibility.